One of Thet's youngest megacities, Archiva was founded by the Lyrisclensiae in 603 iky within the borders of Lilikoisa. As its name suggests, it was initially constructed as an historical archive, storing immense amounts of data from the hundreds of thousands of years the Lyrisian people had been active as researchers. This was part of the great Research Trust Decentralization Project, which was started following the disaster at the Trestuanarion, which until then had been the Lyrisians' single central repository for all data.
Archiva's placement was selected carefully to protect it from as many natural disasters as possible: a hundred-million-year-old caldera, high in a billion-year-old mountain range that seemed very unlikely to be disturbed for the next ten million years. Key buildings were constructed with the intention of surviving artificial disasters, too, being built deep underground and with sufficient human, agricultural, and fuel reserves to preserve operations for upwards of a century on the Lyrisian calendar.
In time, this attracted many Lyrisian historians and researchers from other civilisations, eager to unearth whatever discoveries the ceaseless scholars had dreamt up countless aeons ago. For a time, in the 11th century iky, there were even faddish quests to find the 'missing link' of intellectual development that could relate modern Lyrisiclensian culture back to the exodusial Terrans. By the start of the fourth millennium, Archiva boasted a population of a million, mostly living in subterranean arcologies which were so robust as to be practically space-worthy—and it was a good thing they were.
During the Shattering, many old fault lines, including those through and around Archiva, were reawoken. As the planet shred itself, the city was shaken apart, leaving many of its most significant structures free-floating.
Archiva's placement was selected carefully to protect it from as many natural disasters as possible: a hundred-million-year-old caldera, high in a billion-year-old mountain range that seemed very unlikely to be disturbed for the next ten million years. Key buildings were constructed with the intention of surviving artificial disasters, too, being built deep underground and with sufficient human, agricultural, and fuel reserves to preserve operations for upwards of a century on the Lyrisian calendar.
In time, this attracted many Lyrisian historians and researchers from other civilisations, eager to unearth whatever discoveries the ceaseless scholars had dreamt up countless aeons ago. For a time, in the 11th century iky, there were even faddish quests to find the 'missing link' of intellectual development that could relate modern Lyrisiclensian culture back to the exodusial Terrans. By the start of the fourth millennium, Archiva boasted a population of a million, mostly living in subterranean arcologies which were so robust as to be practically space-worthy—and it was a good thing they were.
During the Shattering, many old fault lines, including those through and around Archiva, were reawoken. As the planet shred itself, the city was shaken apart, leaving many of its most significant structures free-floating.
